


umbra, penumbra

by aceface



Category: American Gods (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-09-20 11:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17021745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceface/pseuds/aceface
Summary: He has stood on a battleground of the gods. What comes next?





	umbra, penumbra

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koanju (verstehen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verstehen/gifts).



> For koanju. Happy Yuletide. This is sort of TV/book canon to be more fitting with your request (I've read the book, but it was a while ago). I hope you like it.

After Easter, Shadow has to think.

He isn’t new to thinking. Laura had said once that she did all the thinking, and all the speaking, and Shadow reckons only one of those things were true. She’d thought up their plan, but it hadn’t worked.

Shadow likes thinking. He likes things that are methodical - he likes silence so he can turn his thoughts over and over and sometimes, like a stone, like he’ll find something new and surprising underneath them.

Now, he has a lot to think about. When your dead wife returns with a coin lighting up her insides… and that’d just been the start of it.

He feels like he’s been gone for his whole life and now he’s here, picking it up again. Or trying to.

So he goes back to America. It feels like it makes sense, like a piece slotting into a puzzle. He’s been all over America, and the familiarity of the unfamiliar is something he’s used to. Shadow feels like he can’t comprehend everything that’s happened - like it’s bigger than the inside of his head. Like a picture where you can’t see all of it at once. It just doesn’t _fit_.

He has stood on a battleground of the gods. What comes next?

So Shadow goes home.

He finds a small house that he can pay for with gold coins - the seedy looking landlord bites down on one of them, looks surprised when it chips a tooth. He needs to get a job, but whatever he does, he finds gold coins - under the mattress, rattling around the washer, clenched in his hands when he wakes, imprinted on his palms and lined with blood.

He tries collecting them in jars, but the jars are too many and it looks strange. So he buries them outside, shovel turning over the fresh earth, and he doesn’t think about the last time he threw a gold coin into the ground.

Easter comes to visit him, just once. She finds him in his dreams - a lush, green landscape, bursting with flowers. A drop of red at the centre of each once they unfurl.

“You could do more than this,” she remarks, stood next to him, both of them staring out across the fields. “You could do anything.”

It’s a little vague. Shadow isn’t very good with ambiguous statements. Laura always told him what she wanted, what she expected, what the two of them would do together. She had been his conductor. Shadow had travelled along the tracks.

“I don’t want to do anything,” Shadow says, but the words taste wrong in his mouth. He tries again. “I want to do something.”

That’s not right either.

“I want something.”

Easter laughs, not unkindly. She places a hand on his arm and her pastel pink nails dig into his skin. “Doesn’t everyone?”

Shadow shrugs, and Easter’s hand tightens.

“The war is over, Shadow. Nobody won.”

When he wakes, Shadow makes a list of his wants.

  1. New boots



That’s as far as he gets, but it seems a good start. He likes the way the words look on the paper, black sharply contrasted against white. There is nothing magical about new boots - they are sturdy and solid. You can go anywhere you like, if you have good enough boots.

Shadow isn’t used to staying in one place anymore. He stands outside the house, with the loose tiles and peeling paint, and he thinks, _I could fix this_. He digs his hands into his pockets, and pulls out another golden coin.

There are some things that you cannot fix.

Shadow thinks about the Zorya sisters, about Czernobog and Simargl. He thinks about chains, and what it means if they’re broken. If it still matters that they even existed at all. Shadow thinks it does.

He doesn’t want to go and see them. He hasn’t seen any gods while he’s awake. He doesn’t want to.

Shadow likes things that are solid, now. He likes a strong pair of stiff leather boots, splinters in his skin, things that ground him to the earth. He goes for walks - long walks, staying away from fields. He likes the man-made roads, the thought of people laying down tarmac and dirt and concrete. He watches the cars zip past, and doesn’t think about Media or Technical Boy or Mr World. He doesn’t.

The seasons change. The house stays the same.

It leaks in the winter. There’s a steady _drip drip drip_ by his head and he wakes on more than one occasion to his pillow soaking wet. It’s the sort of thing that he knows he’s supposed to do something about but he’s reluctant to give up something that feels so real.

In his dreams, he sees Czernobog. He sees a sky of stars.

One morning, he wakes up to find that the weight of snow on the roof has broken through the tiles, through whatever makes a roof. For all Shadow knows about gods, he knows even less about building. But he wraps himself up in a coat and pulls on those stiff leather boots and he climbs up on the roof to look at it. He has a tool box. He can find a place to start.

Spring brings a feeling like missing a step on an escalator the first time he sees the tips of tulips poking through the grass. He digs up the flowers in the garden and throws them out, wincing every time the shovel hits glass. In the local store, they’ve started selling eggs. Mr Varnes, who runs the store, hooks his hand through Shadow’s elbow when he’s buying milk and bread.

“Easter’s coming up,” he says jovially, as Shadow stares down at him. “Will we be seeing you in church, Mr Moon?”

“It's Shadow,” Shadow says. “I don’t worship anymore.”

He stays in his house for most of March, April, May. Damp seeps through and spreads dark fingers over the walls. Shadow sponges it off and replaces the wood, finds some anti-mold paint. He doesn’t stop in the hallway - he paints the front room, the bedroom and the tiny kitchen, too. Everything looks newer, somehow, when he’s done. Gleaming.

There is a coin behind the microwave. Another on top of the doorframe.

Shadow leaves them where they are. He’s worried he’ll run out of space in the garden.

Summer hits and it’s too hot to sit in the house all the time, even with the window open. He buys some wood and fishes some nails out of the tool box and builds a chair - thick and steady and strong enough to hold him. He thinks he sees a raven in the corner of his eye while he works, but nothing’s there when he stands up and looks for it, shading his eyes with his hand.

But there’s not much of a garden to look at after he pulled up all the flowers. Shadow wanders the aisles of a gardening store with a basket in hand, looking for something specific. Bushes that grow best in the winter, winding ivy that grows all year around. There are colours to be found outside of flowers, things that don’t symbolise new beginnings.

That evening he sits in his rocking chair and toes his boots off. For once, he doesn’t feel the urge to wander.

In fall, Shadow cleans the gutters. It seems like no one’s done it for years and he mends them too, with some sealant. It’s surprisingly cathartic, getting his hands dirty. The only thing he used them for with Mr Wednesday was bringing things down and breaking them. It doesn’t take a therapist for Shadow to know why fixing things feels so good now.

It’s winter again before Shadow knows it, but this time the house is cosy. The new paint is still shining, and the roof is solid and secure. It’s nice inside, sitting on his beat-up old sofa in front of a fire. He doesn’t have a TV. Doesn’t like them so much, these days.

But he has a bookshelf that he built himself, even if he won’t have a Christmas tree in the house. He has low, flickering lamp light and a thick rug on the floor. He bought the wool himself, handing it over with some coins to Mrs Maegery down the road who loves to knit. He pays for everything with the gold coins and everyone just seems to take it as a peculiarity of him. If people think you’re rich, they don’t tend to mind so much what you do.

When spring hits again, Shadow looks up at his house and almost doesn’t recognise it. The boots have been at the back of the closet for a few months, and he still goes for walks but he likes when the house comes into sight again. He’s thinking of maybe asking the landlord if he can buy it, if he’ll take gold coins for it.

He’s putting down roots. It doesn’t seem so bad somehow.

Easter’s in his dream again, one hand on the side of his face as she looks up at him.

“Did you find it?” she’s asking, her eyes searching his face. “What you wanted?”

Shadow wakes to gold coins and the smell of fresh earth and flowers.

This year, he goes to church on Easter Sunday. Mr Varnes nods at him, and Shadow hides his smile.


End file.
